Free Love & Death by Max Wallace Page B

while I was writing the book. But even Krist and Dave didn’t know how much Kurt was using.” Despite its flaws, Come as You Are remains a valuable behind-the-scenes portrait of Nirvana at the peak of their career.
    Because of Kurt and Courtney’s almost obsessive attempts to control the information disseminated about them after the controversy involving the birth of Frances Bean, it’s sometimes difficult to figure out which of their public statements over the following two years can be trusted and which should be dismissed as spin. Both checked themselves into rehab and made genuine attempts to kick their habits, and both apparently more or less failed. “I knew that when I had a child, I’d be overwhelmed and it’s true,” Kurt told the Los Angeles Times after the couple had finally won back full custody of their baby in 1993. “I can’t tell you how much my attitude has changed since we’ve got Frances. Holding my baby is the best drug in the world.”
    “He adored that little girl,” says Alice Wheeler. “You’d see him with the baby carrier and the diapers, the whole setup. His mood wasn’t quite so morose anymore. I think he really got off on being a daddy.” All of his friends echo this description, calling Kurt a changed man. “I was invited to Frances’s first birthday party, and I noticed how different he was. When he was with his daughter, he just lit up,” recalls Kurt’s friend, Seattle rock photographer Charles Peterson. Kurt’s grandfather remembers visiting the couple’s Seattle house when Frances was almost a year and a half. “Courtney was going out to a club or bar or something and she wanted Kurt to come with her,” recalls Leland. “But he just wanted to stay home and play with the baby. He just thought the world of Frances.”
    Around the fall of 1993, something else happened to lift Kurt’s mood. Over the years, a succession of stomach specialists had failed to determine what was causing the unbearable agony in his lower abdomen. So mysterious was its source that some doctors even believed it was psychosomatic. Finally, one specialist decided to look a little further into Kurt’s early medical history and discovered that, when he was a child, he had been diagnosed with a mild case of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. He consulted the medical literature. Scoliosis can sometimes cause pinched abdominal nerves, and this is what had been causing Kurt’s pain all these years. Once the problem was diagnosed, it took a simple prescription to erase the pain.
    In more than one interview over the years, Kurt had described his stomach pain as so agonizing that it made him want to “blow his brains out,” a phrase that would soon prove uncomfortably prescient. So those who knew him couldn’t help but take notice when they read the first interview where he announced that the pain was gone, in the January 27, 1994, issue of Rolling Stone, two months before his death. “It’s just that my stomach isn’t bothering me anymore,” he exults. “I’m eating. I ate a huge pizza last night. It was so nice to be able to do that. And it just raises my spirits.”
    To the average fan, these words are innocuous and would hardly register in the months to come. More than one reader, however, remembered another of Kurt’s quotes near the beginning of the same interview.
    The writer, David Fricke, revealed that, when he caught up with his subject in the middle of Nirvana’s U.S. tour, he had expected to find what he describes as the Cobain press myth—a “pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic.” Instead, he writes, he was surprised to find Kurt in a thoughtful mood, taking great pains to explain that success doesn’t really suck—not as much as it used to anyway—and that his life was pretty good and getting better.
    In the years since his death, the public has been fed a steady stream of assertions about the supposed despair that led to Kurt’s suicide. Even many of those